Ripping off the tops of mountains (called strip mining) by blasting the trees and top soil off to get at seams of coal is just as bad for the environment as drilling holes in land above or below the seas. The despoiling of beautiful trees in their native habitat is evidence of the human statement that the profit motive to get the coal out trumps what Nature took thousands of years to produce (to say nothing about the denizens in those forested hills).
Erik Reese in the bottom of the Op Ed section of the NY Times this morning described how the Appalachian forests are going, going gone with false efforts to plant new forests in their place. I would have hoped (or, if given the opportunity) to state my objection to the ruination of these forests – unless remediation of the destruction immediately was started on the slag heaps left behind while the machines and men dug deeper and in different virgin locations. The practice of dumping the detritus of mountain tops with their shreds of trees and fauna down into streams below have left behind a legacy of the ruined planet that the greed of men causes.
Mr. Reese’s sarcastic title for this article is “A Beautiful Mine”. What he is saying is what the despoilers call ‘good’ is not. In the search for fossil fuels once found and burned will be gone forever. The mines corkscrewing down through the strata laid down millions of years ago are not beautiful. They will leave scars that no one is doing much about. There are pious protestations that the mountain tops, while gone for good, can be replaced with judiciously planted forests to take their place. These promises were made as justification that blowing off the tops of mountains was the quickest way to get at that valuable coal needed in the search to make the population happy with cheap energy.
Energy is NOT cheap and is getting more expensive at the pump and at the plants where coal is burned to produce electricity. It is also a dirty way to do this and a way to dirty and disable our once clean and beautiful earth. There is no such thing as a beautiful mine. It is dangerous, execrable and so very 19th Century.
People friendly and earth friendly solutions abound. Greed knows no boundaries once established and Greed feeds on practices once adopted and which are locked in as the “way we do things.” I still think the sun shines down every day even if pollution blocks it. Let us use the sun, the tides, the wind and ingenuity to push strip mining and off-shore drilling into the dustbin of history.